


Rend

by morphogenesis



Category: Exist-Archive
Genre: F/M, Post Curse of Immortality Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28178274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphogenesis/pseuds/morphogenesis
Summary: Kiriya and Ema go for a stroll and end up with a stabbing and a love hotel.
Relationships: Myoji Ema/Kiriya Tokihisa





	Rend

**Author's Note:**

> who the fuck wanted exist-archive fanfiction? me. i wanted it. i got kiriya to love ema but i could never get ema to love him back so i work my frustration out in fanfiction.

Kiriya pulls the knife from his side, hissing at the way it grinds against his ribs. He doesn't savor the way that the punk’s face drains in horror. The blood pulses from Kiriya’s open wound, soaking through his jacket and into his waistband, and he rushes the other and pins him to the wall by the throat. The alley has no witnesses save Ema, who is not in the mood to help after the guy attacked her first.

The punk pleads, "I—I didn't mean to, man! I slipped, I was just leaving—"

Kiriya considers that and releases him just to grab his arm and hold it up by his head, peeling the fingers back. "You're a Yamaguchi wannabe. How do Yakuza apologize again?" He presses the knife to the first joint of the other’s little finger, and the guy squeals like a kid in trouble.

Kiriya exhales and throws him to the ground, and he rolls over and repeatedly bows _dogeza_ , apologizing and begging for forgiveness from Kiriya and Ema. He can't be older than them but he sounds a decade younger.

"Go," Ema says quietly, and he runs. When he's gone she looks at Kiriya with curiosity—her eyes are open slightly wider and her lips purse. When she's happy with him she blinks slowly and shifts on her feet a little, almost rocking. "You protected me."

"Duh." Kiriya looks at his jacket, still bloodstained. She'll like that. He takes it off (the stab wound already closing) and puts it over her small shoulders. She has to put it on and hold the front together to keep it from slipping off her thin but not frail body. "Let me know if any of them bother you again." Guys like that are annoying punks with something to prove, and officially Kagato Myoji isn't dead, just hiding. Ema's a target because she exists. Kiriya's one guy, but his reputation precedes him and it shrouds Ema with that extra protection. More subtle than her Goemon, which he's had to stop her from waving around before.

"Your blood is still warm on this jacket," she says and he scoffs in disbelief. "It'll smell like it even after I wash it."

"Keep it if you like that so much." He wipes the knife off with a good handkerchief from today's lunch and throws both into the trash. "C'mon, Suzaku will make my life hell if we're late."

**

Suzaku likes to make his life hell regardless, but it doesn't help when Ema's first greeting is, "Kiriya was stabbed on the way here."

"What?!" Suzaku exclaims, making several people turn. She never cares who's looking at her. She slaps her hands down on the table and exclaims, "What sorta bullshit—"

"Shut up, you look insane," Kiriya says, and shoots Ema a glare. She blinks at him and tilts her head: amusement. "It was nothing."

"Another person threatened us," Ema adds.

"Maybe because he keeps doing things like this," Suzaku hisses, leaning across the table. She looks at Kiriya and demands his pocket change, and he tells her where to go. She rolls her eyes but pulls her own wallet out of her purse. "Fine, Ema I want..." 

Ema gets up to order for them, a task he knows will take much longer than a normal person as she likes to stare at the menu and debate the pros and cons of products to herself. He wants to give up on taking her grocery shopping because of this. 

He takes a seat opposite Suzaku and says, "Don't talk to me like I'm a dumb kid."

"Well the common denominator of all those stabbings is you." Suzaku folds her arms and slumps back in her seat. She's got nerve lecturing him on how to act right. "This isn't Protolexia." She laughs at him because she's the only one who can get away with it. "And she doesn't need a champion." She shakes her head and mutters something about men.

"I don't care about that. She's..." Weird, but not like how Suzaku and Koharu and Yui are. "She needs a friend."

"Don't we all need a friend who'll stab someone for us, I guess."

"I didn't touch him." Much. 

Ema comes back with their food and he stirs his drink instead of drinking it. Everything here tastes like salty garbage and he only came because Suzaku was around. Her social media accounts are never idle, but he still has no clue what she's doing until she posts a selfie with a new filter or a picture of food. 

Suzaku and Ema make small talk and Kiriya learns much more about mascot characters than he ever wanted to know. There’s a new _kimo-kawaii_ mascot and the girls show off their cell phone charms and Suzaku pulls up a wishlist on her phone filled with merch. Ema’s wide-eyed and admiring the pictures with flushed cheeks, focusing more on the “gross” than the “cute.”

When they go to part ways, Suzaku grabs Ema’s wrist and says loudly and pointedly, “Don’t let him get stabbed on the way home.”

Kiriya touches the spot where the knife went in, the skin and muscles already whole again. He jumps when Ema pokes the matching spot on his other side, facing her. “Next time I’ll stab someone,” she says, looking at him, and Suzaku throws up her hands and cusses.

**

On the train, Ema presses her hand over one eye, the one that used to be blind until Kagato put a sword through her heart to make her whole, and tilts her head to look at Kiriya. She looks like a sea creature or like he’s viewing her through a fractal that way. They look at each other until the train stops and the flow of people compels them out. 

“What is that?” he asks her as they walk up above, the rain so light it feels more like thick mist.

“I wanted to see what you would’ve looked like before.” She tugs his jacket up over her neck and it just slides down again. “The world was a lot blurrier then. You weren’t different.”

“Thanks.”

“But you feel different.” She covers her eye again and he does the same in a half-mockery of her. “I’m glad I met you when you wouldn’t hate me.”

In his vision, she’s right—she’s a shape not an object, and he has to turn his head like a kaleidoscope to capture the fine details of her like the way his jacket is sliding down her shoulders and she’s got a tiny, finite smile defined mostly by her lip liner. He’s quiet and takes his hand away, blinking rapidly to restore her in his vision. A tense but softly tingling aura runs along his skin through the rain and it’s the feeling that he’s either about to kiss someone or twist away from their touch.

When Ema lowers her hand she reaches for his and he lets her take it, her small hand wrapping around his like a seashell embracing a hermit crab. That they’re touching like this and face to face in the real world is proof enough of what he wants to argue. That it wasn’t her he hated, and it wouldn’t be. Not now.

Remembering, he steps back and mutters that they’re in public, and Ema smooths down one pigtail. 

She says, “So take me out of public.”

“What?”

“I know where we should go. Follow me.”

**

A red glaring neon sign above the bed advises Kiriya that, “We see what we want.” He doesn’t need to be judged by love hotel decor right now; he knows it’s baffling that he’s let Ema drag him into a love hotel so they can lay side by side on one bed, fully clothed and holding hands. The whole room is red and dark like Ema’s old outfit from Protolexia. Right now she’s in something that reminds him of a school uniform and they sink deeper and deeper into innuendo the longer Kiriya considers the situation. He’s never seen a dildo in person before now and he doesn’t like that a small collection of them are on the table near the bed.

"How did you get us in here? I didn't know you knew Kamiki." Kamiki is one of Kiriya’s friends, and a manager here who has little qualm about letting in squatters like themselves.

"He works at the thrift store too."

Oh. Kiriya guesses he's taken Ema there a few times. He remembers suddenly: Ema in dark blue, a high collar and swaying, long sleeves, dark tights and the knicks on her hands from a scuffle using Goemon a few minutes before their arrival. His right knee stung and the laceration traveled up his inner thigh. 

He’d said, "Why am I always the one getting cut when we hang out?" 

She turned and looked at him with a straight line for a mouth, her hair gathered up by her crown to keep it from upsetting the way the blouse lay against her skin. The mirrors reflected her in triplicate yet no face seemed the same.

 _Oh God,_ he'd thought. There was no difference between this and when she once snatched his collar and yanked him aside to dodge the claw puncturing the empty space he'd just filled.

Now, she's still holding his hand and neither speaks as the room watches them. He lets the room blur and coalesce into a red void. He both can't and doesn't want to ask what happens now.

"Suzaku will never stop rubbing it in that she saw this coming," he says in a dry, uncertain tone.

"What's coming," Ema intones. They are both nothing if not conclusive speakers. There's no deliberation, just decisions. That electric feeling is back and his skin thrums with it in anticipation, beseeching him to move and satiate the hunger it announces.

He remembers when Kagato put a hand around his throat and squeezed until he saw black spots and when he let go Kiriya fell on his knees and slipped in his friends' blood when he tried to stand up and almost fell on his own knife. There was a time when the only thing he wanted to do with his hands was kill that man.

He lets go of Ema so he can roll over, throw one leg over her to hold her legs together with his knees, and supports himself on his elbows when he leans down to kiss her. He moves against her still mouth, tasting creamy and bitter lipstick when it smears against his lips. She doesn't move until he pulls off her to breathe, like an amateur with his heart and lungs squeezing, and she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and streaks it dark and shiny from where he drooled on her.

"Say something, will you?" Kiriya demands.

She links her hands behind his neck and pulls him closer and says, "It'll get all over your face," before she kisses him back. 

She's not wrong. When he looks at himself in the mirror afterward, his fingernails have her pale foundation under them and her lipstick is on his tongue and somehow her fucking mascara on his cheekbones. The redness on his face is his own. He can still feel her heel digging into his calf when she pushed him onto their sides and hooked her leg around him to use for leverage, and her arms to hold him as close as possible. His lower body and heart and gut are pissed he didn't take the opportunity and run with it; when she felt him and rolled her hips towards his he moaned and dug his hand into her hair but he stayed stubborn and clothed.

“Come here,” Ema says and he looks back to see her sitting up, necktie askew but hair straightened. He obeys and she forces him to put his head in her lap like they’re on TV. He feels her breathing from where he is and she touches his hair curiously. “Can we go fishing now that you like me?”

“Sure,” he mumbles into her knee.


End file.
